Look At These Incredible Photos Taken By Pulitzer Center Journalists Flying Over the Oilsands This Week

Journalist Dan Grossman and photographer Alex MacLean are in the middle of their week long tour of the Alberta oilsands. Their on-the-scene reporting is meant to bring greater public attention to the scale – and the stakes – of developing oil from the world’s largest deposit of carbon-intensive bitumen.

As Grossman puts it on the Pulitzer Center website, “We know the ground beneath Alberta’s boreal forest—saturated with an estimated 150 billion barrels of oil—rivals all other troves of oil apart from those of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. We know Alberta’s rich deposits underlie a territory of 54,000 square miles, as large as Iowa. But we can barely comprehend numbers this big. Alex will help us. He’ll show us waste ponds nearly the size of Manhattan and dump trucks that could swallow a McMansion whole.”

Grossman has been tweeting about his experience in the oilsands region prolifically since April 4th. Below you can see some of the duo’s photojournalist coverage of their trip so far.

* Updated April 16, 2014: Journalist Dan Grossman and photographer Alex MacLean have removed one photo that was initially thought to show unrecovered oil from seepage on a CNRL site. CNRL officials insist the black substance in the photo is water mixed with soil, not oil. Since the photo was posted, the company has expressed greater willingness to allow journalists to inspect the site.

Grossman told DeSmog Canada that he's pleased CNRL is showing greater openness about the site, which local journalists had been asking, unsuccessfully, to visit. “By excluding journalists from the site, CNRL was making it hard to know what was going on and whether company pronouncements were correct,” he said.

"Fossil-fuel companies have spent millions funding anti-global-warming think tanks, purposely creating a climate of doubt around the science. DeSmogBlog is the antidote to that obfuscation." ~ BRYAN WALSH, TIME MAGAZINE

About

A pipeline at Nexen Energy’s Long Lake oilsands facility southeast of Fort McMurray, Alberta, spilled about five million liters (32,000 barrels or some 1.32 million gallons) of emulsion, a mixture of bitumen, sand and water, Wednesday afternoon — marking one of the largest spills in Alberta history.

According to reports, the spill covered as much as 16,000 square meters (almost 4 acres). The emulsion leaked from a “feeder” pipe that connects a...